Not just living, can make young people feel "what kind of incense is beautiful in human nature" | Fragrance Culture Professional Committee of Shanghai Arts and Crafts Industry Association | Young people

It's not a skill, it's a whole set of aesthetics

Chinese literati have pursued qin, chess, calligraphy, painting, poetry, wine, flowers, fragrance, and tea since ancient times. Among the nine elegant things, "fragrant things" are often overlooked by modern people. Surprisingly, nowadays, more and more young people are starting to like incense.

Opening various platform websites, many videos of young people practicing fragrant seal script come flooding in, with dozens of pages to browse. On the shopping platform, there are no fewer than a thousand shops selling incense utensils. Offline, temporary markets in summer malls often offer stalls selling incense sticks. The market for traditional incense culture has taken shape.

Wu Qing, the inheritor of the intangible cultural heritage of the Jiangnan literati incense industry and the director of the Incense Culture Professional Committee of the Shanghai Arts and Crafts Industry Association, said that in recent years, all the applicants for his training courses are young people. This relatively niche project is becoming popular in a low-key way.

Xiao An, born in the 2000s, has always had friends playing with him. They will light a stove while chatting over tea. The fragrant cloud slowly rises and gradually becomes distant, as if the spleen and stomach have been opened up. When she saw Wu Qing enrolling for her fragrance course on weekends, she immediately felt tempted to sign up.

In recent years, there have been many incense classes on the market, with prices ranging from a few thousand yuan to tens of thousands of yuan, highlighting business opportunities. And Wu Qing's classes were rated as the more difficult category. He teaches not only the art of making incense, but also a complete set of lifestyle and aesthetics for literati in Jiangnan.

The course starts with knowledge of incense culture, and the art of making incense is just a part of it. The content includes examination and identification of incense utensils, identification of spices, practice of incense usage, incense room decoration, arrangement of incense mats, classification and identification of fragrant spices, process and etiquette of incense mats.

In addition to more than a dozen classified quizzes, the final "graduation" exam is very interesting. Each student needs to organize an incense banquet and an elegant gathering.

Screenshot of Wu Qing's course PPT

For this exam, some students didn't hesitate to pull their suitcases over. After opening, various antique utensils and artworks can be seen. On the surface, this may seem like a test of a student's ability to independently complete a traditional incense ceremony, but in reality, the competition is about each person's comprehensive cultural heritage and aesthetic taste.

Wu Qing introduced that a complete "incense banquet" is not simply about lighting incense on the stove, it has many steps.

After arranging flowers, drinking tea, and appreciating artworks, one gradually enters the fragrance room to enjoy the fragrance. The decoration of the incense chamber has its own unique style. There is a complete set of tools on the table: incense burner, incense seal stove, stove, incense box, incense charcoal, incense chopsticks bottle, spoon chopsticks, incense knife, feather broom, fire partition, incense towel, as well as several types of incense to be tasted.

Be calm when entering the room. A furnace of incense spreads three times, change the charcoal, and then change another furnace of incense. Three burners of incense make nine times. After finishing the nine rounds of fragrances, enter the "sitting class". A person sits upright in a chair, hands flat on their legs, slightly closing their eyes, savoring the scent they have tasted with their breath, and even "listening" to the fragrance with their ears. After about 20 minutes of sitting in class, use a pen to write down the experience of savoring fragrance on "fragrant notes".

The whole ceremony may seem tedious, but after truly experiencing it, everyone is focused and calm, their worries are temporarily left behind, and their state is indescribable.

Many young people immediately develop an interest after their first encounter with the activities of playing fragrant seal script or incense mats. Sometimes, young people only need one chance to interact with traditional culture.

Wu Qing said in class that Chinese people use fragrance, from enjoying physiological senses to exploring psychological depth, and finally sublimating it into a knowledge-based aesthetic experience.

How much can Song people play? When fragrant wood catches fire, there must be smoke and a burnt smell. How should we evaluate it? The Song people burned incense charcoal and then steamed and roasted it with firepower to achieve the purpose of producing incense, but they made it impossible to see smoke.

In terms of realm, tasting fragrance is not only about distinguishing odors, but also about the "perception" of the olfactory organ and the "visualization" of thinking, which is called "nasal observation".

The ancients also proposed the aesthetic judgment of "hesitancy". "Doubting and seeming" refers to grasping a kind of spiritual beauty between the seemingly present and the seemingly absent, which is very similar to the Zen state of "saying that something is like it is not in the middle".

"Modern people are actually boring, and no ancient people would play," said Xiao An. After finishing class, she had a sudden realization that was related to what she had seen while visiting museums.

"I just realized that incense burners have a significant proportion in the collections of major museums. But I didn't understand them before and didn't pay attention," sighed Xiao An.

Screenshot of Wu Qing's course PPT

Not only museums, but also various types of paintings. Previously, we could only see people climbing mountains and playing the piano in Chinese paintings, but we didn't pay attention to the fact that the people in the paintings still had incense burners and other utensils on their desks.

After each class, Wu Qing would provide students with a book list, such as "Chronicles of Changwu", "Dream of Tokyo", "Li Yu's Essays", "Yutai Xin Yong", etc. He hoped that students could become familiar with and even memorize the ancient incense theories and prescriptions in "Xiangcheng", "Xiangpu", and "Xinzao Xiangpu".

For example, a young man who came from Beijing specifically to pay his respects to his teacher, completed the incense section of "Kao Pan Yu Shi" according to the requirements of the book list, and then memorized "Tian Xiang Zhuan" written by Duke Ding Jin of the Song Dynasty. He felt that it was not enough and hoped that Wu Qing could open another book list.

Wu Qing asked, "What can you recite?" The young man replied, "I can recite" Xiangcheng "." Xiangcheng "can be said to be a masterpiece of Chinese incense culture before the Ming Dynasty. In terms of volume alone, there are several complete stacks of "Incense Ride".

Interestingly, during the incense class, a separate flower arrangement class will also be arranged. Unlike Western style flower arrangement, the elegant and concentrated flower arrangement of literati in Jiangnan emphasizes elegance and does not dominate. During class, the flower materials are also not uniform. Wu Qing smiled and said, "You can pick them up everywhere in the park, and you can also use local materials.".

Student works

The students choose the varieties according to their own preferences, and after inserting them, Wu Qing will review the works one by one and make adjustments. Sometimes with just a little fine-tuning, there is a difference in aesthetics.

Student works

After Wu Qing made minor adjustments

It is difficult to extract a unified flower arrangement principle and method. Each student has different materials, styles, and techniques. It's really tailored to local conditions and people.

"Different from the Japanese way of incense that emphasizes technique, China has not revered formalization since ancient times. The artistic conception and character can only be admired, obtaining its charm and spirit, rather than imitating it in form." Wu Qing emphasized.

It is this cultural force that moves towards the heart that attracts today's busy and anxious young people.

It's not a knowledge point, it's a spiritual fit

Xiaoji is pursuing a doctoral degree in environmental science at a university in New York. She feels a lot of pressure from pursuing a PhD, especially when the experiment cannot be completed and the data is not ideal, and her mood is particularly anxious.

After studying Xiangshi, she found that she had regained her composure. But is this brief detachment a form of escape?

"When I return to reality, my mindset will change," she explained. The nourishment of traditional culture made her realize that "the heart has no place to live" and "the environment changes with the heart.". Worries are still troubles, and what needs to be done still needs to be done, but the heart can remain calm and indifferent to the ups and downs of things.

In the sense of ritual in traditional culture, the process of lighting incense, writing, drawing, and arranging flowers, the stillness of body and mind, is a correction to the rhythm of modern life and work inertia. "I began to feel that humans are not just living animals or spinning tops that follow things," she explained.

Similarly, in recent years, the guqin has been very popular among adults. What is the purpose of learning the guqin as an adult, without the need for grading or showcasing skills?

"Satisfy one's emotional value," said Zhong Zhiyue. He is an associate professor at Shanghai Conservatory of Music and the president of the Guqin Association of Singapore.

Zhong Zhiyue recalled that 20 years ago, the guqin was unpopular, and if it weren't for his major in guqin at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, it would have been almost difficult to find a teacher on the market. After graduation, he successfully enrolled in a folk band in Singapore and became one of the earliest teachers in Singapore to teach the guqin. Among his students, in addition to Chinese, there are also Japanese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Indonesian, French, and so on.

In 2019, he returned to Shanghai as an introduced talent to teach. He found that the situation in China is similar to that in Singapore. Regardless of where they come from, adult students work hard because they truly enjoy traditional culture and gain some psychological strength from it.

Among ethnic musical instruments, the guqin holds a unique position. It is the expression of the inner thoughts of literati and scholars, not to please others, but only to please oneself. A piece of ancient music called "Drunk Madness" can be explained for three hours by Zhong Zhiyue, extending the content of many traditional cultures.

The outbreak of the guqin learning craze occurred in the past 10 years. The more complicated and anxious modern society is, the easier it is for people to be attracted to the guqin. Some people only pluck the string once and listen to a sound that ripples, using it as a way of cultivation.

Xiaoyu has been studying and working abroad before, and has stayed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. She is particularly fond of calligraphy and traditional Chinese painting.

One day in 2018, she and a friend were writing calligraphy in a small tea house. The two of them spent a whole afternoon writing, even forgetting to have dinner. They didn't look at their phones or reply to emails throughout the whole time, and time passed by in a flash, their hearts like a never-ending ending. After thinking about it, she felt that her state that day was "super invincible happiness", so she resolutely resigned from a large company in Singapore.

Afterwards, she followed Zhong Zhiyue to learn the guqin. Due to having a foundation in piano and violin since childhood, I have mastered the guqin very quickly. But that feeling is different from learning Western instruments when I was a child. Although Western instruments have laid a solid foundation for her music, she cannot gain emotional resonance from them, or in other words, she cannot respond to her ultimate need for care in life.

Since childhood, Xiaoyu has been thinking about life and death. Grandpa lived in the ICU for 4 months before his death, with various tubes inserted into his body and unable to move or speak. Is this really alive? Xiaoyu thought. The days spent with her grandfather guided her to think about the meaning of life and what kind of life to spend in order to reduce her fear of death.

She is familiar with the history of Western philosophy and art, and has also received knowledge and thinking training in modern scientific systems. "But in the end, she found that what aligns with you in terms of spiritual perception, rather than knowledge points, is still traditional culture," she said.

It's not a mistake, it's rhyme

Xia Xin, a young pipa player, has been exceptionally talented in playing the pipa since childhood and has embarked on a path of seeking artistic talent. "I was born and raised in China, and my perception is closer to our own ethnic music," she said.

For example, the rhythm of Western music is fixed, with a few beats per measure and not a single beat being wrong. But how long a folk music performer pauses or drags on a note can be determined by the moment's intention.

"Those inaccurate rhythms are our 'rhyme'. As long as they are not blindly played and within the artistic conception, they are allowed," she said. The criteria for judging folk music are also more difficult. How is the difference between a poor student with a chaotic rhythm and a master with skillful handling? "People who understand music can hear it immediately." But it cannot be quantified and cannot be expressed.

Xia Xin gave an example, it's like a person's heartbeat, which accelerates or slows down on its own as emotions fluctuate, rather than being deliberately controlled by the brain. Every moment of playing the piano is influenced by the current emotions and undergoes natural changes.

Chinese musical instruments care about this subtle change and are unwilling to frame it in form. This kind of music is more in line with the cosmology of harmony between heaven and humanity in our traditional culture.

Xia Xin believes that when playing Chinese musical instruments, artificial intelligence cannot calculate the "rhyme" that cannot be repeated or designed. The software can collect timbre, but it only collects the timbre played by this person at this moment, the next moment, the next moment's sound and rhyme, and the software is powerless. This differentiation is particularly prominent in folk music.

"That is a natural change that is particularly interesting in modern society," Zhong Zhiyue described. The process of acquiring folk music can dissolve some of the constraints of modernity on people, leading to a certain level of spiritual stability and liberation.

However, currently, the high click through folk music videos on websites are all playing pop music. Why is playing an ancient song so unpopular? Xia Xin said, "What people have been exposed to and heard of since childhood is still Western twelve tone music. Many people are not accustomed to the scale and tone of ancient music."

As the younger generation becomes more knowledgeable and folk music gradually breaks through, such auditory habits will change. But perhaps it will take several generations for traditional culture to become more normal and free spirited.

The way of life and cultural aesthetics of literati and scholars in Jiangnan are particularly contemporary and targeted, as the vase flowers are about to bloom, but the furnace seal script is not yet gone. Lying down to listen to the vase sheng, they are leisurely and secluded. It can become a spiritual force for young people to cope with reality and the future.